Friday, December 17, 2010

Save the Date: March 16, 2011

The Southeast DSAC (District and School Assistance Center), the Cape Cod Collaborative, and MassCUE (Massachusetts Computer Using Educators) will be sponsoring a no-cost, one-day institute entitled, “Lassoing Local Data: Creating Systems that Support a Culture of Inquiry.” The Institute will be held on March 16, 2011 at Stonehill College in Easton and will be open to teams from school districts in the Southeast region.

Please see the attached flyer for additional details and watch for registration information in January 2011. Thank you, and Happy Holidays!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Start with a Cube View

There is a new folder in the Data Warehouse in Public Folders > ESE Cubes > Cube Views which contains a variety of views of the 2010 Cube that can serve as excellent starting points for additional inquiry. Not all users have learned to develop cube views (which is trickier than accessing the pre-defined reports) but interacting with these pre-made cube views is much simpler.

Current cube views include:
  • MCAS CPI Trends by Grade Level
  • MCAS Demographic Trends
  • MCAS Performance by Grade Level
  • MCAS Performance by Year
  • MCAS School/District CPI vs State CPI by Grade
  • MCAS Special Education Performance Gap Trends

Click the cube view that you'd like to investigate (for instance, MCAS Performance by Grade Level) and use the Dimension Line at the top of the screen to "filter" the data by choosing the desired district or school, subject area, subgroup, etc.)

To save the cube view you created, you can click the Save As icon in the lower right corner and save it to your My Folders area. (Don't worry, you won't overwrite the public cube views.)

To convert the cube view to PDF for printing, click the File button in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen (looks like a page) and choose Export PDF.

For more information on cubes, please see Chapter 3 of the EDW User's Guide.

Listing all reports on one screen in EDW

One point of confusion with EDW users stems from the fact that not all reports in a given folder (such as ESE MCAS Reports) appear on one screen. The default is to display only 15 at a time, which sometimes leaves folks wondering, "Where are the rest of the reports?"

I was glad to learn how to change this:
  • From the upper right corner of the Welcome screen of the EDW, click My Area (person icon) and then choose My Preferences.
  • Change the "Number of Entries in List View" to 50.
  • Click OK.

An easy fix that will save you at least a little bit of frustration!

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Data Update from the Curriculum Summit

This week, I had the opportunity to attend the state's Third Annual Summit on Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment in Marlborough, so I thought I'd share what I heard and learned here on the blog.

Commissioner Mitchell Chester kicked off the Summit with an overview of successes and challenges in Massachusetts' public schools. He spoke with excitement about the opportunities that lie ahead for us in terms of funding (RTTT and other sources), next-generation assessments (the multi-state PARCC group), and new ways of looking at student performance (the growth model).

I attended a morning session focused on the Massachusetts System of Tiered Instruction - "a data driven prevention, early detection, and support system with the aim of providing high-quality core educational experiences for all students and targeted interventions to struggling students who experience learning and/or behavioral challenges." We heard from two school districts (Pittsfield and Winchendon) who have implemented this model for math and literacy, respectively. Even in these "best-practice" examples, the ongoing challenges related to data were evident - WHAT data to examine, HOW to utilize it (and by WHOM), and WHERE to keep it. But the more we can share and collaborate on these challenges, the closer we can come to addressing them.

Our lunch speaker was Julia Phelps, Executive Director for Curriculum and Instruction at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. She spoke about the new Common Core State Standards and engaged the audience in thinking about the process for transitioning to these new standards over the next few years. In terms of changes to MCAS, her main points were that the spring 2011 MCAS will be based on the existing Frameworks, and the spring 2012 MCAS will be based primarily on the intersection between the existing Frameworks and the new Common Core. It is clear that MUCH more information will be coming out to support districts during this transition, so stay tuned.

The final session I attended was Creating Formative Assessments for Mathematics using Released MCAS Items which reminded us of the wealth of test questions available through ESE, and provided some ideas for using these as a "dipstick" for measuring student understanding.

Please note that the PowerPoint presentations and other materials from the Summit will be posted on the ESE's Summit Web page in the upcoming weeks.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

District Folders: A Place to Share Report Views and Cube Views

Did you know that you can save both Report Views and Cube Views to the District Folders area of the Data Warehouse, so that they can be accessed by others in your district who have Data Warehouse access?

This is especially valuable when one person creates a cube view (like the strands-over-time example described previously) and wants to make it available to his/her colleagues. It's much simpler for those folks to USE the cube view rather than trying to re-create it themselves! It can also be used to easily share district- and school-level reports with colleagues (see note below about sharing student-level reports.**)

To save the output from a pre-defined report (a report view) in District Folders:

  • Click Keep this Version and then Save as Report View
  • From the screen that appears, click on Select another location...
  • Navigate to Cognos > Public Folders > District Folders > [Your District Folder]
  • Note: Reports can be saved in HTML, PDF, or Excel format, depending on how the report was produced.

To save the output from a cube (a cube view) in District Folders:

  • Click the Save button (looks like a floppy disk, in the lower right corner of the cube screen)
  • From the screen that appears, click on Select another location...
  • Navigate to Cognos > Public Folders > District Folders > [Your District Folder]
  • Note: A saved cube view can be easily modified to change things like grade level, year, subgroup, etc.

If you're running reports in the background (which you should be!), you can specify that these reports can be saved to District Folders using similar navigation. You can also create subfolders within District Folders (for different groups of reports.)

**Please be aware that reports or cube views placed in District Folders can be viewed by any of your district's Data Warehouse users (but not users from other districts). Caution should be taken if student-level reports are placed in District Folders, as not all of your district's users may have the legal authority to access this data. There are ways to set various levels of security on subfolders within District Folders although this is beyond the scope of today's post.